I agree that this question falls under the category of “everyone knows” what it means. But then you’re forced to ask yourself just far do you want to live your life based on the presumption that “everyone” will know what you “mean” even, and perhaps especially, when what you “mean” isn’t what you actually “said” at all.

So for example, “everyone knows” that guys lie when they say “Yes, baby, I’ll respect you in the morning.” Sure, it’s the stuff of a running joke these days, but it’s still a lie. And when asked what I wanted to “be,” at no point did anyone mean anything else other than what I wanted to do in order to earn money.

So that rather innocuous question became my first lesson in real-world semantics and introduced me to the games–some plain silly, some carrying very serious consequences–I would have to endure once I did start “working for a living”.

Even that previous phrase, “working for a living,” falls under the category of “everyone knows” what it means. Only that’s not really true, nor accurate, at all.

After nearly sixty employers, I and most others do indeed “work” for the purpose of earning money to make our way through life. I have, however, known many who do indeed “live to work”. Their careers and occupations are indeed their very reason to take up space on this planet. And when these two diametrically opposed convictions clash, it makes working a living hell.

So the simple truth, the real answer to that question was this:

“When I grow up I want to be a reasonably good, decent, and civil man who is going to do the best he can for himself, his family and friends, one who tries to leave the world just a wee-bit better than I found it.”

You see, to this very moment I have no clue what I want to do in order to earn money when I grow up simply because I never, in that sense of the word, grew up. Since I’d been a young lad, I’d been watching those who were “grown up” and it was as if they were older than what the calendar said. They were tired of and tired from the stuff of their lives–most of which was consumed by their jobs, their careers, their occupations–and there was no passion left for anything else.

As Ally Sheedy’s character says in The Breakfast Club: “When you get old, your heart dies.”

And so began the dilemma which has lasted all of my “working life,” the observation and participation in a war that takes place on a battleground called “the workplace”. This war has the fancy name of “business ethics” and it’s the conflict between what employers want and expect us to be tossed into the arena with what we are actually paid to do.

“Business ethics” is the greatest of all oxymorons.

http://randyvaughan.blogspot.com/

Article Source: The Big Question